When we worked up our procedure for importing Lidar into Civil3D a couple months ago, we realized there were way too many steps and way too many hoops to jump through. Hoops preparing the data, through Recap to prepare a RCP/RCS, through Civil3D creating a point cloud, and finally creating the surface. Highly trained professionals have more important things to do with their time than spend it like a well trained circus animal jumping through hoops, so we did something about it.

Like many things in Civil3D, they can be done but how it’s done isn’t so obvious. In the process of adding a DEM surface to your drawing you may notice that you can’t project it to another coordinate system (that of the drawing). Here is a step-by-step procedure including assigning a coordinate system to the current drawing.

ESRI Shapefiles are not just the SHP file. While some importers can import the geometry from just that one file, a lot remains missing. That’s why it’s important to send the package, not just a single SHP file.

A popular request is to export geometry in a Civil3D drawing to Google Earth in a KML/KMZ format. This post contains details on how to do it, with a step-by-step procedure for Civil3D. For recent versions of Civil3D, you will want to use the EXPORTKML command because it will support the most object types (including AECC objects). However it has some quirks and this procedure may help iron them out.

We have been receiving support issues ranging from program files being invisible (as in saying it can’t find a file you know is there) to outright alerts of our code being a virus. These have of course turned out to be false positives, a failure on the part of the antivirus software. A company that’s been in business for nearly 30 years does not produce viruses.

A frequent question is how to import Lidar data like LAS/LAZ or other point cloud formats into Civil3D. Here is a step by step procedure on the process, using Civil3D 2018 as the target. The procedure assumes you have your Lidar data files downloaded and ready in a folder.

With many things in Civil3D, it’s not readily apparent what you need to do. Here is a step by step procedure on how to import FLT fault files. These files are ASCII files you can drag/drop into a notepad and you will see “#AdCADD DTM 12.00 User defined fault file” followed by numerous lines of coordinates.

A Civil3D forum user recently stated they have “been supplied ~500 .tiff files from a DEM which contain elevation data” and the prospect of repeating the built in Create Surface from DEM tool 500 times did not appeal to them (only to have 500 separate surfaces). So we set out to create a tool to help.

Most ESRI Shapefiles of contours are defined as flat polylines (at 0.0 elev) in the SHP file, and the user is expected to elevate the polylines using data defined in the accompanying DBF file. Here is a complete procedure using MapWorks to import these files with the polylines properly elevated.